Wednesday, July 27, 2016

My pulseaudio on my lubuntu 16.04 pooped out today and I could not select my output/input destinations from my customary utility. Ergo, I could not skype effectively to my boss. Here is the concise fix for the problem copied from askubuntu.com thread...

Saturday, July 23, 2016

Got a new (refurbished) HDD for my HP-Compaq-Elite-8300-SFF computer this week. It arrived Thursday after ordering last weekend. I am going from 140GB drive to 2TB Hitachi refurbished drive from a Ebay offer that looked too cheap to pass up. Finally got to installing this AM on my system. Here is how I proceeded. Never having used clonezilla before I was unsure how to proceed.

After attempting to use clonezilla from the running system, admittedly a rookie mistake, I quickly realized that it needed to run in standalone mode from some boot media. I opted for the tuxboot route (see link at bottom) to get myself setup with a clonezilla USB stick. Had to install some qt4-dev-tools and p7zip to satisfy the tuxboot compile. I pulled the tuxboot source and ran the "INSTALL" and done. It is literally so easy on linux that it made me feel sorry for windows users. Actually I do feel sorry for windows users on a regular basis since I am forced to use it in my professional life.

Next, I hooked up my new drive via my handy dandy "USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter" which I purchased several years ago. This device is basically able to turn most any drive into an external unit temporarily to perform utility work such as this.

I then booted into my clonezilla stick. A word to the wise here... Be patient! This is a USB stick not a SSD. Once clonezilla was running I selected the local disk to local disk options and the beginner route which saves you from having to answer all sorts of embarassing questions which you won't necessarily know the answers to without google access. It tells enough information to easily allow you to recognize which drive is which: things like drive size and manufacturer name are pretty obvious don't you think? Finally after selecting source and destination you are given the option to copy all the grub data for your multi boot and etc. I am really glad I opted into that by the way. More on how that worked out below. Finally, you answer a couple or three final "are you really sure" styled questions and away it went. Around thirty minutes later it reported total success.

Now on to the good part. I booted from my old drive one last time. I ran gparted and resized my existing "/home /var/log" partition on the new drive. Remember my new drive is still outboarded at this point. Of course gparted had no issues finding it and allowing me to make my partition adjustments. I selected my outboarded drive and clicked on the last partition (the one mentioned above). Then in the menu I selected resize option under the "Partition" menu. Then you just grab the right edge of the partition and slurp it out to use all available new space and then you are ready to apply the changes and shortly you are done. So easy a child could do it.

You should bear in mind that the roles of sdd and sdb are reversed now. But you see that clonezilla has preserved the UUID setup perfectly so no further piddling around with mount points or fstab was necessary. All I had to do was shutdown and shove the new drive into the machine and bam... DONE!

Look at this vast expanse of digital desert waiting to bloom with new and exciting content:

Monday, July 4, 2016

Had to do some more disaster recovery mode tweaks to my new lubuntu 16.04 LTS server install today. This is due to my shortsighted install of the software and boot image into a small 16GB SSD I had as surplus from my chromebook upgrade a while back. I created a /home on a 70GB partition that I carved out of the 140GB hdd that came with the system. The 4 available partitions were all consumed by silly and one entirely useless w32 partitions. I shrunk the main w32 down to 70 and removed one entirely after transferring its content to the third partition. This allowed me to carve out a new ext4 for my new linux home partition. Now on to my problem...

Today I discovered that the /var/log context on my install/boot filesystem had exploded and filled up my entire root partition... duh! So, I googled for a while and finally settled on booting single user and then mounting the /home manually so I could move all the log content to a path like this:

"/home/tim/varLogBudDontRemove/log"

Then I created a bind mount content like this:

"mount --bind /home/tim/varLogBudDontRemove/log /var/log"

/home/tim/varLogBudDontRemove/log /var/log none bind

Now after some more googling I found how to make this mount happen at boot time in the fstab file:

"/home/tim/varLogBudDontRemove/log /var/log none bind"

Now if I can just solve my network (wireless adapter) disconnects the system should be getting close to stable long term hopefully. The network seems more stable already since resolving the "/" filesystem full problem. I have a new supposedly more powerful USB wireless dongle on the way from Panda Wireless (via Amazon) $30 with 2-day express shipping!